Steven Den Beste has posted a serious and sober commentary that echoes the somber mood of Bush's press conference. This is proper. Anybody who thinks war is fun and games either is a sado-masochist or an idiot. I think that the participants of the U.S. Civil War knew that. The Brits learned it from WWI. We may have forgotten with our view of WWII promoted by propagandistic films at the time and afterwards, but we should know better after Vietnam, Blackhawk Down and Saving Private Ryan. This ain't beanbag.

We have a town called Moab in Southeastern Utah. They aren't too happy about this.

The only thing that justifies weapons like this is that they may save lives by shocking the enemy into dropping operations. It may also be a way to deal with biochemical weapons if it can be brought to bear in a site where they have been used, by sucking up surrounding air and incinerating it. I've heard or read that the daisycutters dropped in 1991 were a strong incentive to surrender for the Iraqi troops.

If you still don't get how sober this occasion is, go read some poems, Dulce et decorum est, The Man He Killed; or The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. These guys aren't driving Lincoln Navigators over there. The weapons designers put all the money into performance. They're at the bleeding edge of technology and they sometimes fail and kill their operators. But we use them to deliver maximum hellfire to the enemy.

It must needs be that these offenses come, but woe to them (Saddam, bin Laden, Arafat and the rest) by whom they come. We all want peace, but not at the cost of cowering and fretting from those skulking hyenas who attack our civilians and their own.

Here is a link to a description of the kind of men we should have to lead us in times like this. And here's another about how such men deal with men like Sadam, the Zerahemnah of our time.

Behold, we will end the conflict.


Update: I didn't read the whole of Den Beste's piece. When he speculates that they might join the war on Saddam's side and use nukes, I think that is going beyond the the evidence. Moussaoui is a French citizen, and, given a chance, I imagine he'd go for nuking us, but France is playing with a weak hand. I doubt that even Chirac would be so stupid. A lot of Americans would like to see it try.